Last night I connected Jasmine to her machine and watched as the initial fluid drained out of her peritoneum as usual. What was not usual was that the fluid coming out had a little hint of pink. I switched all the lights on for a better look – it was still slightly pink. The fluid should be clear.
At first I thought it was bettadine – the antiseptic stuff which is inside each catheter cap and gets washed away – but after a while, as Jasmine wasn’t draining too well, this pinkness stayed.
We waited until her first drain – as the first rule of anything different is ‘keep an eye on it’, and eventually the line cleared leaving a long red fibrin in there, but her drain bag had a definite hint of pink still. So, I rang the ward. They were lovely and reassuring as always and said that sometimes the catheter inside her peritoneum can rub and cause a bit of bleeding and things should resolve themselves but definitely to keep an eye on it.
Just before going to bed, we checked again, there was still a pinkness in the drain bag but her lines had cleared and there was no sign of fibrin. This morning when we got up we studied the bag, the fluid looked quite clear with just the tiniest bit of blood in one corner of the bag. It is a lot of fluid as Jasmine has 11 fills through the night of 270mls so that produces one bag of three litres, as the lines get primed with fluid before we connect her, in the morning. And after much hunting we found one tiny bit of fibrin even though the one in the catheter looked enormous. We have been told though, that with all the fluid washing back and forth from Jasmine’s peritoneum, fibrins tend to get broken down.
The pink fluid freaked me out a bit, which is typical because everytime we think we have this dialysis thing under control something happens to make us nervous. Thinking about it now, it makes sense, that sometimes there will be a bit of irritation, Jasmine has a large plastic tube where she shouldn’t have and if that rubs against the peritoneum then occasionally it is going to irritate the wall and causing a little bit of bleeding. Still, it had me worried.
Tonight when we plug her in, we will be keeping a close eye on everything, just in case, but this morning her temperature was fine and Jasmine drank all of her milk. She is currently snoozing on the camp bed, after keeping her dad up since 5am. Neil very kindly let me have the camp bed in the living room this morning so I could have some extra sleep. Now he has gone back to bed as he looked worn out, poor thing. And now, I am sitting here all awake whilst everyone else is asleep and the clocks have gone back so it isn’t even 10am. What am I doing out of bed? I am tempted to get some shut eye and then hopefully when I wake up the washing and tidying will have done itself.